Key Takeaways
- On the Moonshots podcast, venture capitalist Dave Blundin said Optimus revenue would top Tesla’s own revenue at 1.6 million robots a year.
- At Blundin’s own price of $30,000 a robot, Tesla would need to sell about 4 million Optimus robots to match the $122 billion of revenue analysts expect from it in 2027.
- Elon Musk has predicted well over a billion humanoid robots within 10 years, and at 187x forward earnings, Tesla stock already pays for profits today’s estimates don’t show.
- Optimus isn’t due to ship to outside customers until around the end of 2027, and that’s the proof I’d wait for before paying today’s multiple.
The bull case for Tesla (TSLA) keeps shifting from cars to robots, and on October 31, one venture capitalist put a number on when the robots overtake the car company.
On the latest episode of Moonshots with Peter Diamandis, Link Ventures founder Dave Blundin worked through how many Optimus humanoid robots Tesla might build next year. This is where he landed: “if he gets to a million next year, at 1.6 million, the revenue from Optimus is greater than the revenue from Tesla.”
Elon Musk is thinking 1,000 times bigger. Speaking by video to the G20 Innovation Ministerial in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on September 1, Musk said that “10 years from now, I would say there are well over a billion humanoid robots.”
Those two numbers count different things. Musk’s billion is every humanoid robot in the world, from every maker, a decade out. Blundin’s million is what Tesla builds in one year. Both sit far above where the industry is today. On the same episode, Diamandis said worldwide humanoid shipments are projected to top 50,000 this year, and that “if Tesla hits a million robots a year, that’s 20 times the entire world’s supply.”
Blundin’s Math Needs About 4 Million Tesla Robots
Blundin supplied the price himself: “100,000 of them is $3 billion worth of robots.”
That’s $30,000 a robot, the top of the $20,000 to $30,000 range Musk has given for Optimus at scale. At that price, a million robots brings in $30 billion, and 1.6 million brings in $48 billion. Tesla already brought in about twice that in 2025, with $94.8 billion of revenue, and analysts expect the top line to keep growing:
Analysts expect $122 billion in 2027, the “next year” Blundin was talking about. To match that at $30,000 a robot, Optimus would need to sell about 4 million robots, roughly 80 times this year’s projected global supply. Keep the volume at 1.6 million, and Tesla would need to charge more than $76,000 a robot.
Tesla’s own timeline doesn’t close the gap either. On its third-quarter earnings call on October 21, Musk said it would take “at least a year, maybe a little longer” for the Fremont Optimus line to reach 20,000 robots a week, or about a million a year. He expects the first deliveries to companies outside Tesla around the end of 2027. On Musk’s own schedule, a full year at a million robots looks like 2028 at the earliest.
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What Tesla Stock Is Already Paying For
Nobody owns Tesla for a $30 billion robot business. Musk’s case is that robots will start building robots, so output starts slowly and then grows explosively. At his $20,000 to $30,000 a robot, a billion humanoids is $20 trillion to $30 trillion of hardware. Even a thin slice of that would dwarf everything Tesla sells today.
The multiple already leans on that hope:
Tesla trades at 187x forward earnings, against a five-year average of 108x and a December 2025 peak of 243x. Analysts expect normalized EPS of $3.30 in 2028, still below the $4.07 Tesla earned on the same basis in 2022. At 187x, buyers are paying for robot and Robotaxi profits that don’t show up in the estimates yet.
Why I’d Wait for Optimus to Ship Before Paying Up for Tesla
Tesla is funding the robot buildout from a business that earned a 2.6% GAAP operating margin last quarter. On the October call, it said the robot’s hand was still in development.
A million robots a year would be a great business. At $30,000 apiece, though, it would equal about a quarter of the revenue analysts expect from Tesla in 2027. That doesn’t justify 187x on its own. The upside is in Musk’s billion, and I’d want Optimus shipping to outside customers before paying for it.
The bull side deserves its due. Diamandis noted on the show that Musk tends to get these calls right, just a couple of years late. The next checks are the Optimus video Musk said could come within “a month or two” of the October 21 call, Tesla’s fourth-quarter results in late January, and AI5 chips going into Optimus around April 2027.
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